How Online Market Intelligence can Change Retail

For retailers monitoring & understanding their competitor's strategy is now ultra critical, ignoring real-time dynamics can prove to be a serious trouble. Its solution is DataCrops web data extraction platform for 'Online Market Intelligence'.

Online retail transactions are continuing to increase rapidly every year. Consumers are buying at record rates online and this development shift indicate that power has shifted away from the retailer and gone in the hands of the purchaser.

At the same time, customer loyalty to online stores is decreasing. Consumers when shopping online, continuously follow lowest prices to save money. The earlier fear of ordering online has also being drastically reduced as per the current market scenario. The tremendous market shift has thus resulted to a very acute competition which has further forced organizations to build online market intelligence.

Understand competition: For retailers monitoring and understanding their competitor’;s strategy is now ultra critical and ignoring real-time dynamics can prove to be a serious trouble. Online market intelligence for retailers is a key competitive and strategic advantage that can help them building focused sales, increase market share, engage new revenue streams, increase productivity and streamline their own operational expenses allowing better business value and growth. Smart retailers have recognized these market realities and have focused a lot of their attention on the branding and competitive price games. Since pricing on a wide range of competitive goods changes dynamically throughout the day, it’;s now critical to implement robust analytic capabilities and automate price monitoring solutions.

Retail industry is among the early adopters and innovative users of online market intelligence. Here are a few use cases where online market intelligence can offer great value for retailers:

a) Real-time pricing: Retailers need real-time updates on pricing for their products and services. It helps them work on promotions, discounts & special offers to survive in this tough market competition. They need 24/7 market and competition insights to maximize their sales & productivity. Web data extraction helps in tracking this real-time pricing.

b) Brand intelligence: Retailers are always keen to create deep understanding of consumers and influencers related to demand generation and their decision-making processes. By collecting information as how people are talking about their products on e-commerce websites, social media sites, forums, review sites – retail companies can empower themselves. Web data extraction assists in designing brand intelligence strategies.

Combining & Mapping data: The final value-addition will be derived by combining and mapping external data, such as a product performance review or competitors prices, to the internal data of retailers like product performance testing or future product roadmap for improving business performance. The analysis will assist brand specialists, business analysts, product managers for competitive, strategic and operational decision making to ultimately generate more sales.